I’ve been away from this blog of late; every time there was the slightest bit of interesting health/environmental news, it would cross my mind to blog about it, but then I’d feel like I was just rehashing the same points. Consumerism bad! Simplicity good! Meat eating and plastic bad! Vegetables and natural good — Too easy to draw my own caricature! I mean, I like helping disseminate green tips, but since An Inconvenient Truth, I feel I can relax (and finally stop getting really upset about things) because environmental stories are everywhere now. The fact that I can link to articles instead of writing them myself is nice!

Progress to enlightenment is much harder than cutting down dioxins and greenhouse gases. Though, it’s occurred to me within the last 2 months that I must have encountered the Dharma before in previous lives, and it must have left an impact. Though it took me over 2 decades in this life to figure out.

Whether you believe in previous lives or no, here’s how my life started: At a very young age, less than 10 years old, maybe 8 or so, I had some very un-childlike thoughts. The first was that I had a lot of debts I owed to people, including strangers. I had the weird feeling that even if I grew up to have a comfortable life, on a level I could not be completely happy with that comfort, because I owed it/would owe it to a lot of people. Perhaps not financially, but that a lot of people had/would have contributed to that wellbeing (past, present, future), and I had no idea how to repay them. Those people, I could not define. But there was the feeling that I could not limit them to just people I would meet or have met, or who would have contributed in physical ways.

It was a very weird thought to have as a child. How does a child feel indebted to strangers or how can they foresee being indebted to strangers? Only now can I look back and think it finally makes sense in the light of Mahayana Buddhism, which teaches that concept as a matter of fact.

The second thing I experienced as a child that I remember well, is perhaps not that strange. What I did was that I challenged adults and their assumptions, attachments and preconceptions a lot and pretty early on. Quickly I learned they weren’t always right – in fact many adults were downright silly, creating fusses about handbags, and gossip, or cars. They based their happiness on things I immediately saw as quite unsatisfying. Alas, the only result on my part from this wonderful insight (even now) has been to whine about the shallowness of these people!

But then again, in my teenage years I fell into the same trap. I never went crazy over handbags, gossip or cars, but did base some happiness on books, “fandom”, popularity and art. I think I’m doing OK now extricating myself from these, and feel better for it. What’s odd is now facing the growing emptiness (with no negative connotation) left when the artificiality and anicca of these is left bare and obvious to see. Odd that it often feels like a relief.

The recent revelation of Mother Theresa’s confessions of feeling emptiness in her life – her “Crisis of Faith” – I am sorry that she experienced suffering from it. (It sounds like it, anyway.) I see a pattern now in Western Society, a pattern that I question if I’m seeing accurately. But emptiness in Western culture is definitely bad. The word connotes sadness and loneliness. Fullness is good (in this, most Chinese are agreed, perhaps… “full” in Chinese is a Very Good Word, great for pasting on your rice pots, rice wine jars, and possibly your wallet). Alright, so maybe it isn’t just a Western thing, but my exposure to Western media that is making me sick of running into the cliche that happiness is to have everything – money, house, car, family, man (if you’re a woman), woman (if you’re a man), children, friends and nobody around you ever dying, all of your loved ones living life to the full… Yes, that would be wonderful, but is that going to last…forever? And are you sure that, even in the event that all that was true for the moment, you could be completely happy, or would you become unhappy, say, if your hamburger was slightly burnt one day, or you caught a cold, or one of the thousand things you base your happiness upon goes wrong?

It just seems to me that the person who needs the fewest things to be happy is going to be happier or happier more often than the person who needs a lot. But modern society, with its emphasis on living larger and having more and more has no room for this little bit of logic. (Perhaps I’m asking too much wanting more in this life to make sense…) Or, having more and more is “logical” because, well, emptiness is just so scary. At least if you trust cultural biases and Hollywood movies that want to imagine that they know what happiness is. All of it is usually about clinging. I find myself recognizing that very quickly into movies nowadays, that I lose interest in the plot or characters because in my head I’m thinking, “well, if you let go of that expectation, you wouldn’t suffer…”

Which completely ruins movie viewing, of course. (Thanks, Second Noble Truth!)

Anyway, I guess recently I was happy to realize that the feeling of anxiety/indebtedness I had as a child may have been, perhaps, an existing understanding of the First Noble Truth. It was a mystery for a long time, until only recently.